Our farm wasn’t any different. Daddy said the Kellys stopped growing tobacco way longer back than even he could remember, but in the far corner of the peanut field there was one of those old barns, all gray from living who knows how long through the weather—and, as Mama said, always one good gust away from falling down. Daddy had been promising to go knock it down and take the wood to the dump since I was only a little older than Mylie, but it was one of those things he just kept not getting around to.
When Arden and I were ten, we snuck into the tobacco shed without any of our parents knowing and set ourselves up in there, bringing old broken-down folding chairs I grabbed from the trash can and a tablecloth Arden’s mama had thrown out, and calling it our little house. The shed smelled like sweetness and dirt, all the beams stained with tobacco juice, and light and shadow draped over us from the holes in the walls and ceiling.
We played there for a whole year before anyone figured out where we were disappearing to.
When they did, though, there was a reckoning. My mama yelled and yelled, and my daddy went the kind of dead quiet that was almost worse than yelling, and Arden’s parents sat her down in their living room and had a long conversation where they said lots of things like we trust you very much, but and we know you’re very responsible, but and dangerous and condemned and would be heartbroken if anything happened to either of you.
My daddy swore he was going to tear that barn down for real this time, which he didn’t, but Arden and I both got scared enough that we never went in even long enough to get our stuff out. Instead we built the playhouse, which creaked and groaned if the wind blew too hard and which our daddies were pretty sure wasn’t much safer than the tobacco shed—but at least it was smaller, so maybe it wouldn’t kill us quite so quick if it fell on us.
Now I was glad we’d gotten found out. This spot wasn’t all that much farther from my house than our old tobacco shed, but it felt like it was, looking out over the still waters of the bay and hearing the loons that never seemed to make it over to our place. It felt like a different world than the one I’d left behind in my hot, hopeless house this afternoon, and right now, that was what I needed more than just about anything at all.
Arden came late in the afternoon, after I’d already been at the playhouse for a few hours—nearly dinnertime, by the grumbling in my stomach. I’d given in and opened up my bag of sandwiches and was finishing them off, warm peanut butter and sticky honey oozing down my thumbs.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Della Kelly,” said Arden, putting her hand on her hip and raising her eyebrows at me just the way she does when she’s babysitting and Eli gives her sass. I felt my own eyebrows going down, down into deep frowns. Nobody who wasn’t your mama or your own big sister was allowed to give you that kind of a look.
“Shoulda looked here first, then,” I said, licking off the last of the honey-sweet peanut butter and tucking the empty Ziploc back into my backpack. I was feeling cranky, the heat so bad that my hair was nearly soaked with sweat, ponytail and all.
“You should have come to the house first to get me. Why didn’t you?”
I hesitated, the words heavy on my tongue. I rooted around in my backpack and pulled out a bottle of water—warm now, of course—and took a drink so I didn’t have to answer.
Arden waited, not saying a word, until I finally put the bottle back down. You couldn’t play chicken with a girl who had four little siblings. She was still watching me with that expectant eyebrows-up, give-me-your-answer-young-lady sort of face; I wondered if her forehead was hurting yet.
“You said you’d been looking for me everywhere,” I hedged. “You been over to my house?”
Arden nodded. “Your daddy was out in the fields and your mama didn’t know where you’d got to.”
“How were they? What were they doing?”
“Who, your parents?”
“Mama and Mylie.”
Arden gave me a funny look. “Um . . . your mom was at the kitchen table, and Mylie was playing. Why? How long have you been out here?”
“A few hours, I guess.” I bit my lip, looking down at the dirt underneath me. “I ran away.”
“You what?” Arden scooted around so that her face was right next to mine and I couldn’t help but look her in the eye. “Are you serious, Della Kelly? For one thing, that’s a stupid idea. And for another, you don’t think your parents will figure out you’re here as soon as they realize you’re not coming back? And what about your mama? She definitely hadn’t realized it yet. She’d have been in full-on panic mode if she had. Doesn’t that worry you even the tiniest bit?”
I chewed at the inside of my cheek, wishing I felt as confident as I had a few hours ago when I’d packed up my backpack and slipped out the front door of my house.
“I can’t go back yet. A couple days ago I was over with my daddy at Mr. Anton’s house, and Miss Lorena was there. She told me something about how exercising your brain is important when you get older—it stops you forgetting stuff.” I looked past Arden, out the door of the playhouse and to the blue water of the sound, trying to ignore the doubtfulness on her face.
“I don’t know, Della. I’m not sure that’s true for your mom. Isn’t schizophren—”
“It’s true. It’s got to be true. I’ve tried everything else, Arden,” I said, watching a line of geese flying high up over the bay. Everything. Even the Bee Lady and her useless honey. “You gotta believe me about that.”
“I just don’t feel right keeping the secret for you. And how long are you planning to stay here, anyway?”
I hunched my shoulders up, half shrugging, half curling into myself to try to hold off those tears from coming. “Maybe a day or two. But see, it’s already working! You said Mama was out of bed and watching Mylie. She hasn’t done that for two days!”
Arden still looked worried, but at last she sighed and nodded. “I guess so,” she said, picking at her nail polish the way she does when she gets upset. “Though I still don’t really feel right about it.”
“Thanks,” I said, relief running its way through all my skin cells, right down to my fingertips. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise. And it won’t be too long. I hope.”
Chapter Nineteen
The sun didn’t set for hours after Arden left, and even when it started to drop down, the humidity kept everything just as hot as ever. My tank top had been damp so long I almost didn’t notice it now. The mosquito bites, popping out up and down my legs even after I’d sprayed enough bug spray on myself that I’d ended up choking on it, were harder to ignore.
It was so quiet out here, without Arden to talk to, without Mylie screaming or Mama yelling or the murmur of the TV in the background. The only sounds were the lap of the water up against the bank and the calling of birds—sharp cries from seagulls as they sailed way above the bay on bodies that looked too light to live, deep throaty cooing of the doves that roosted in the trees and flew down to hunt bugs from between the rows of corn and wheat. Every now and then rainless thunder grumbled, so far away I thought I might’ve imagined it.
After a while, I pulled out the math book and started working through some of the problems. It was a book full of timed quizzes that we’d used last year, in sixth grade, and even though I didn’t have a watch or anything to time myself with, feeling the scratch of my pencil across the worksheet helped me to sink into the deep, calm place I went when I took a quiz in school. My breathing got slower, my shoulders relaxed, the hard, scary things about the world faded around me.
The lightning bugs started appearing just as the sun was going down, sending fingers of orange into the sky over the bay. First one firefly, then another, then a dozen all flitting through the air around me, blinking their yellow lights like stars caught a few feet above the ground. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, watching the lightning bugs dance, and for the first time all week I felt like my heart was opening up just a little bit. All around me the sounds of cicada
s and little tree frogs and crickets grew, their song louder as the sun got lower.
Later, after the sky had deepened into navy, I saw a bigger light bobbing up and down and up and down way across the field. It came closer and closer until I could see that it was Daddy with a flashlight—heading toward Arden’s house.
It took ten minutes to walk from the bay to the Hawthornes’ house, but I could still hear Daddy’s knock on the door clearly through the night stillness. I couldn’t move. The air was heavy on my skin, prickling the hairs up and down my arms the way it does before a lightning storm.
It seemed like a whole lifetime before I heard the Hawthornes’ back door creak open and saw Daddy’s flashlight bouncing toward me.
I scrambled into the playhouse as the sound of Daddy’s footsteps got nearer, but it didn’t take him two seconds to walk around to the doorway and shine his light right in. I blinked, my eyes dazzled by all that brightness.
“Della Cordelia Kelly,” Daddy said, his voice rough as the playhouse plywood itself, “you come on out of there and get yourself home this minute.”
My body twitched, like it was getting ready to mind him whether or not my own brain told it to, but I stayed put.
“You hear me, Della? This ain’t a joke. Come on out of there now.”
“No,” I said, my fingers curled into fists.
Daddy dropped down into a crouch, and when he spoke again, I could hear just how hard he was trying to keep his temper. “Della. Come. On. Home. Now.”
I thought about crying, half because I felt like tears and half because I thought it might make Daddy feel sorrier for me, but couldn’t.
“I can’t.” I realized when the words were out of my mouth that it was the honest truth. Whatever the reason I was out here at all—to help Mama, or to help myself—the thought of going back was even worse than the thought of staying out here, with the heat and the skeeters and the unfamiliar sounds off the bay.
“Della, honey, please come on home with me. You can’t sleep out here.”
“I have before!” It was the truth—Arden and I had camped out here once, near scaring ourselves silly imagining what could be out there in the dark beyond the playhouse walls.
“That was different. It wasn’t just you alone. And Ben and I were probably wrong to let y’all do it in the first place. But you gotta come with me now, baby. Your mama thinks you’ve been at Arden’s this whole time—she’d be terrified if she knew the truth.”
“Tell her I’m sleeping over.” I bit my lip. “I can’t come home, Daddy. I just can’t. It’s too—” I thought of Mama sticking that little pill in her pocket, thought about Daddy saying he’d send Mylie and me away if things got too bad. “I just can’t.”
Daddy sighed and raked his free hand through his hair. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “Things’ve been hard for you lately. The last two weeks, especially. Right?”
I nodded.
Daddy stood up and kicked at the wall of the playhouse. I jumped. But in the flashlight glow, I could see that his face didn’t look mad, just thoughtful, like he was testing the playhouse out.
I waited.
Finally, Daddy crouched back down to my eye level. “I guess this old shack will be safe enough for one night.”
Not one single hair on my whole body moved. I hardly even breathed.
“Tell you what, Della,” Daddy said, and now all the anger was gone out of his voice and he just sounded so, so tired, like he’d been alive for a thousand years and never slept a wink. “I’ll make you a deal. You can sleep in here tonight—if you’re really sure it’s what you want, honey, it’s hot as Hades out here—and I’ll tell Mama you’re sleeping over at Arden’s. I’ll come collect you tomorrow morning before church.”
“It’s what I want,” I said real fast, before I could lose my nerve.
Daddy stood. In the dark night, holding the flashlight, he looked like a shadow, hardly there at all. “Sleep well. I’ll be back in the morning.”
He turned and went back across the fields toward our house, the flashlight beam swallowed right up in that black velvet night.
I curled up in the hard-packed dirt with my backpack under my head, trying not to think about anything: not Daddy’s exhaustion, or Mama, or Mylie sleeping all alone in our room for the first time ever. Not about the thunder that still growled way off almost out of earshot. Not about last week, when Arden and I had found a huge hairy wolf spider in a corner of the playhouse.
Arden’s little sister Rena had nightmares, sometimes, the kind that would send her straight out of bed screaming her head off in the middle of the night. It got so bad a few years back that Miss Amanda started getting a special kind of honey from the Bee Lady, and as long as Rena had a little spoonful of it before bedtime every night, the only kind of dreams that came her way were the good ones.
I wished I had some of that sweet-dream honey right now.
I tossed and turned for a long time before I finally fell into a hot and restless sleep.
When I woke up the next morning I was stickier and dirtier than I could ever remember being. It was a little like waking up after camping, except that even the few times we’d gone camping together as a family I hadn’t been sleeping right on a floor made out of dirt. My skin was tacky and gritty all over—when I blinked, even my eyelids felt dusty.
I groaned and sat up, not sure whether my arms and legs itched more because of the dirt or because of the puffy pink mosquito bites underneath it.
It was early. Out the playhouse door, I could see the sun still hanging low over the silver bay, barely beginning to push its light past the trees that lined the edges of the Hawthornes’ farmland. Away off on the road I could hear the sound of a car passing by.
When would Daddy come for me? A little part of me whispered that I should just go, pick up my backpack and run back over the fields to home without waiting for him, but I couldn’t make myself do it. The thought of maybe seeing Mama there, lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling fan like she could see God—or maybe her dead daddy—in its swirling, was still too much to take.
I pulled out the math workbook from my backpack and popped up the lead on my mechanical pencil, but even numbers couldn’t keep my mind away from thinking today. The heat came on as the sun pulled farther away from the horizon, until I was sweating so bad that the skin around my eyes stung with salt, so I closed them.
Lying there in that playhouse with my eyes closed and the nearest sounds the loons loo-hoo-ing out on the water, I felt about as alone as I’d ever been in my entire life.
I was so hungry I was starting to feel dizzy with it when Arden appeared in the playhouse door, a bag with four blueberry muffins in her hand.
“It’s about time,” I said, sitting up quick and grabbing a muffin from her before she could even say hello.
“It’s barely past eight,” said Arden, dropping the bag in the dirt next to me and sitting down. “Good grief, it’s hot. Doesn’t it make you want to, you know, go home?”
I looked down at the dust on my flip-flops. “How’d my daddy know I was out here last night?”
“I didn’t tell anyone, I promise! Your daddy came over to my place after it got dark last night. He said you hadn’t come home at all that afternoon, and Mom said you hadn’t been over to our place at all. Your daddy looked right at me and asked if I’d seen you. I said no, but he knew I was lying. He said he guessed you were off in that playhouse.”
“He say anything to your parents about my mama?”
Arden shook her head.
I sighed, wiggling my dusty toes. Arden and I had given each other pedicures two or three weeks ago, with lime-green polish and little white starfish stickers, but the stickers had peeled off days ago and the polish was chipping around the edges.
“I can’t believe he let you stay out here all night,” Arden said.
I shrugged. “He didn’t want to.”
“So—” Arden paused, chewing over what she was going to say n
ext. “When are you going to go back home?”
I could feel what Mama called my “stubborn face” cementing itself into place: teeth together, jaw locked up tight.
“What’s the point in staying out here any longer, if your parents know where you are anyway?” Arden pressed. “I mean, you’ve got to be tired, right? And hot.” She pushed a lock of sweaty hair off her forehead.
“She’s gotten worse so fast, and I tried everything I could think of to fix her, but none of it worked,” I said finally, my voice hardly making it past my throat and leaving my words mangled and soft. “Without me helping, maybe . . . maybe she’ll run out of options.”
Arden picked at her nail polish. “Don’t you think you being gone might . . . make things worse? Doesn’t your mama worry an awful lot about you when she’s sick?”
“I can’t go back,” I whispered. “I can’t. Not yet.”
I wasn’t ready to see Mama again. Not to see the mama I’d left, anyway, the one who just lay in bed like she didn’t have a family. Right then, I ached so bad for the mama who sang songs and read books and used big words that the ache liked to swallow me whole.
Arden was quiet for a long time, her forehead creased up like a bedsheet after you’d slept in it.
Finally she stood up slowly, her ponytail only an inch or two below the rough plywood ceiling of the playhouse. “I’ve got to go back up to the house. Mom and Dad will be needing my help with the kids. You could come, too, you know.”
For a moment, I thought about a kitchen that smelled of fresh blueberry muffins, about the way it sounded when Rena and Charlotte giggled, about air-conditioning. My toes scooted, just a little, like they were getting ready to stand up, too.
Where the Watermelons Grow Page 11